WHOOP Podcast - How to Control your Mindset and Feel Happier with Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by best-selling author and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. During the first episode of our How To Series, Will and Arthur discuss how to control your mindset and feel happier. Hear about Arthur’s unconventional background (02:18), the need to become comfortable with the uncomfortable (04:43), key components to setting routine and boosting dopamine (07:25), strivers, happiness, and aging (13:42), intuition and pattern recognition (18:09), breaking down the key components of happiness (20:46), and the importance of embracing unhappiness (25:01). Arthur provides insight on becoming the entrepreneur of your own life (27:45), the balance of unhappiness and happiness (29:55), how aging impacts happiness (33:27), how we need to combat the depression epidemic in young adults (37:40), the key methods to promote happiness (42:50), and how Arthur applies these skills to his own life (47:29).Resources:Arthur’s WebsiteFollow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

biggest reasons that people don't get happier is because they're chasing a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness, like we just finished Thanksgiving, that the smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Everybody listening to the Wu podcast knows that those are the macronutrients that lie behind all consumable calories, is protein carbohydrates, in fact, a.k.a. food. Happiness has three macronutrients as well. It has feelings that are associated with it that are evident.

of happiness. But the three parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need. What's up, folks? Happy New Year, 2025 coming in hot. We've got a great podcast for you today. This is, of course, the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. If you're looking for a big January jump, check out Whoop. You can literally sign up for free. Free 30-day trial. That's dot com. Okay, this week's episode, I'm joined by the talented Arthur Brooks, one of the world's leading experts on the science of happiness. That's right. You want to be happier this year? Let's listen to this podcast. Arthur is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School

and the Harvard Business School. Brooks is a New York Times bestselling author of 13 books. He just wrote and released, Build the Life You Want with Oprah Winfrey. And you may also know him thanks to his popular work from strength to strength. Arthur and I discuss his journey from a concert musician to bestselling author and Harvard professor. The best way for strivers to start their day. That's right. Strivers or people are trying to achieve something. What happiness is? It's a good question. Ask yourself right now to define happiness. You may not love what you come up with. And so we go into his definition of happiness, which is he's studied for quite some time. enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, how the perception of happiness changes with age,

daily tips to live happier, and tackling the depression epidemic. This is a powerful podcast. If you have a question, what's the answered? You can email us, podcast to whoop.com. You can call us 508-443-4952. Here is my conversation with Arthur Brooks. All right, Arthur, welcome to the WOOP podcast. Thank you.

It's great to be on the WOOP podcast, finally. You know, you've got a pretty fascinating career that didn't start in the most likely of places. No, indeed. No, I mean, you don't become a teacher of happiness at Harvard University where I started. I started as a college dropout French horn player because that was the instrument that I was really good at. I started on violin at four and piano at five. I was destined to be a musician and the French horn at eight and that stuck because I was really good at it. My parents had decided they wanted to have a kid who was a professional classical musician and I liked it and it was great. So, and being good at something is unbelievably empowering. It's a rewarding pursuit. Excellence is its own reward. Absolutely. Even when you're a kid, we are made to make progress.

We are made to excel. Humans are excellence machines. So I did that and that's all I wanted to do. I spent a year in college, a little less than a year. Where? California Institute of the Arts. I was unmotivated. I dropped all my required classes, which you're not supposed to do, it turns out.

My father was a college professor. You're unmotivated a class, but you're still pretty great. at the French horn. Yeah, but I was not doing what I was supposed to do in my job, which was going to college. And so my college professor, dad, when I was on academic probation, he encouraged me to pursue my excellence elsewhere, as did the college. And I went out playing professionally. And I did that all the way through my 20s. My parents called up my gap decade. And I went to Barcelona, chasing a girl, and took a job in the Barcelona Symphony. I did a lot of bunch of stuff. I played a couple of years on the road with a jazz guitar player

named Charlie Bird, got married when I was in Barcelona and started my adult life, went back to correspondent school and got my bachelor's degree a month before my 30th birthday. I mean, obviously your career has taken a lot of different twists and turns, and today your Harvard professor, is there anything you look back on about the musical career and sort of miss or long for? Sort of, except that all the jellies I got from being a musician I get now. I'm doing 175 speeches a year about the science of happiness, except that my audiences are bigger when they were when I was a French horn player. I'm better at this than it wasn't that. I get more joy from it. There's an

endless variety of topics and questions that I could be addressing that are unbelievably satisfying and people wanted the answers to. And so I'm doing what I always wanted to do as a musician, just not holding the French horn. Did becoming a great musician help you overcome any types of stage fright or, you know, the sort of the comfort of speaking in front of people. Although speaking was much harder for me than playing the French horn as a matter of fact, the first time I had to give a speech in public, well, the first really high stakes case was at my Carnegie Hall debut and I was 22 years old.

I was playing chamber music at Carnegie Hall and I had to give a little talk to the audience about what the next piece we were going to play. And I rehearsed it and I rehearsed it and rehearsed it. And time came and I walked out and my knees were shaken. It's much easier than playing the French horn is saying, you know, two minutes. words about it, a piece of music, but it was so foreign to me. I wasn't watching my feet and I was so nervous. I fell into the audience. I literally fell off the stage into the audience at my Carnegie Hall debut. It was epic. Yeah. There's a message from God. Do something else.

I interviewed Alex Honnold on this podcast. Alex Honnold's the guy who climbed El Capiton without a rope. Yeah, I've heard him speak. Free solo. And I was doing research on it and I realized that he was incredibly nervous giving a TED talk. And so I asked him about it. And he was like, yeah, I was more nervous doing that than I was actually doing the climb. Yeah, when you're doing something that's not your thing. Now, there's a ton of research on this that shows that if you want to get better at your thing, go do things that you're about at.

Go do things that are not your thing. And that it's that that cross training outside of your excellence is unbelievably good for making more excellent at what you do. And now I actually use that in my work. So I do things that are hard for me. I just got off of speaking to her in Spain. And I go to Spain all the time. I lived in Spain off and on.

But what I'm not as good at is actually lecturing on science and Spanish and Catalina, which are the two languages in Barcelona. Huh. And so that's what I did when I was over there. I was giving speeches. I was giving, you know, stand-up interviews. I was, you know, going on TV. And I was riffing for 15, 20, 30 minutes at a time in these languages that weren't mine

because it makes me much, much better, much clearer thinker about what I'm good at, which is lecturing in English. Now, doing things that are hard is a little different than doing things that you're not good at. True. And so what I do for a living is hard and I'm pretty good at it. But doing something that's hard that you're not good at, that's what you need to be focusing on. And being serious about failing and learning from your own failure and paying attention to the steps. That's how progress actually gets made. And if it's close enough to what you do for a living, when you go back to what you're doing, you start to notice the things that could be better and what you're

truly excellent at. And so that's what I find cross-training in separate languages. That's what I should have been thinking about when I was falling off the stage at Carnegie Hall, but I didn't have the science background at that point. All I thought was is, gosh, what a loser. I start a lot of days with a weightlifting routine with a trainer and a freezing cold plunge and a really hot sauna and a meditation. The collection of each of those things is hard for its own reasons. Yeah. Yeah. And I find that doing that makes the rest of the day comparatively feel a lot easier. Yeah, for sure. It's very important to set those things up in a way that favor your work when you finish too. So you're really good at your job. I mean, you have an important job running this company. And you need to be clear

and creative and focused, right? First thing in the morning, right? So you could hit it. So making sure that that routine that you're setting up actually doesn't take away from it that's additive and not subtractive is key. So, and it's important all the things that you're doing for sure. I have a very similar routine. What time you get up? It depends on the day, but you know, 630. Okay. So there's a, There's an ancient Vedic theory called a Brahmajorta, which means the creator's time. That's an hour and 36 minutes, 248 minute blocks before sunrise is the whole idea. Get up before sunrise is the whole idea. And there's a lot of neuroscience that shows that getting up before the sun comes up

is really, really good for your focus and clarity. Sounds like I should wake up even earlier. Probably. I get up at 4.30. And 4.30 is a good time. And it's easier for me because I'm older than you. And it does get easier as you get older. But also, you know, when your kids are little, it's harder to go to bed early, et cetera, et cetera.

My kids are all grown up. But, you know, you have to get to bed by 9 or 930 if you're going to do that. And then I get up, I work out from 445 to 545. Don't listen to taxing things. Don't do something. It will tax your mental, will require a whole bunch of mental effort. And the reason is because you need your mind to wander. While you're working out, you need to engage the default mode network, which is a series of structures in the brain that makes you, it's self-perception,

it's new ideas. And if you do that, if you don't waste it on some, you know, show that's marginally interesting or a book that might be okay. If you let your mind wander, you'll come up with ideas. And that's really, really critical. Plus, you're not taxing your brain. I mean, you get cleaned up and do whatever you do. And part of your routine, your cold plunge, or your shower, et cetera.

And then you meditate probably. It's a good idea to hit it hard physically before I actually meditate. I go to Mass every day. I'm a Catholic. But a meditation practice is much the same way. And then only then. administer psychostimulants. So no psychostimulants before then. So you've been up for like a couple of hours at that point and then hit the coffee hard and you'll get three solid hours of focus

and creativity. And you can't ask for more than that. You get a ton of dopamine in your prefrontal cortex and you're good to go, man. You can do in three hours what most people can do in 12. That's helpful. I think it's the biggest takeaway I have from that is this question of waking up even earlier, which is something that, you know, it's just like I have to break the routine of going to bed later but yeah that's the key and and some people think they're they're night owls and their circadian rhythms are such that they do really good work at night most people if they would actually change their habits would do even better work earlier in the morning than they think they do at night it's just harder to break the habit so it's very hard for me to do it at first and i never

get up with that an alarm clock i was 60 and i'm still getting up with an alarm clock interesting i would sleep done i just would but i'm not going to do it because i can't i can't afford to lose those three hours. Those are your three hours. Yeah, then nobody gets into that three hours. And then what, what happens in the afternoon for you? In the afternoon, when you don't actually have the same kind of focus, you use it on the things that don't require a lot of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, aka meetings, talking to other people, working with clients, you know, doing business. So all that the business stuff goes into the afternoon. For me, the hard thing is that I lecture at the university in the mornings when I'm in semester. My semesters are usually seven weeks long, so they're

half semesters. And usually I teach in the morning, which is my creative. That's what you want. You'd probably want to do it in the afternoon because it's a little more autopilot. Way better. Well, the teaching is not. The teaching isn't autopilot, but it doesn't require the intense concentration that I get when I'm actually writing a column or writing a book. Right. For that, that's, I mean, that requires tons of prefrontal cortex dopamine, just for that, for that, you know, the zone that you actually can get in. When you're writing a business plan, whatever you're doing that requires that, when you've got a lot of coffee in your system, you beat yourself up without actually taxing, taxing yourself mentally, and your soul

is in order. You take your coffee and man, you get the zone. It's good. Now, this idea that you can be really focused in the morning, but you sort of have to be less focused in the afternoon. I mean, I don't know, I feel there's some days where I feel just as focused in the afternoon. Yeah, some people, you know, and I can get a second way sometimes too. So sometimes if I, you know, after lunch, I go get on a flight, then if I get, you know, I'm flying. Denver or something like that, then I'll get some really good focused time. But it's kind of luck, whereas it's not luck. If I set it up right, I'm getting it. I feel like at least for me, some of it's driven by like a certain intensity or sense of urgency almost. Like if I'm sitting

in a meeting and it's, you know, five in the afternoon, we're deciding whether or not we're going to bid on an acquisition or what the budget's going to be in the first quarter or like how we're about to beat our sales numbers. Like I feel alert, you know. Yeah, for sure. It doesn't feel like it's a choice really no no i get it and there's a little of fight or flight there too i mean yeah you know we're talking in the middle of the afternoon late afternoon from here i'm going to go give a talk and i'm going to you know i better be on man you got to show up it's going to have an hour and i better be in the zone and i can i can do that though the whole thing is that if you're actually trying to do that and this is one of the things that that people learn when they're past 30

and they're trying to do very very striver you know heavy super focused careers is that if you're actually trying to get 12 hours a day of focus and you're doing it without supplementation, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard. And you've got to pick your zones. You know, even Hemingway talked about that. He weirdly, he said he gets two hours a day right. And it's first thing in the morning and he would put his typewriter in a closet. He would face the back wall the closet and then write for two solid dollars. Now, he wasted his dopamine because he wasn't drunk. And the best way for you... He drank a lot. Yeah. The alcohol is terrible if your dopamine. Yeah. And you spend your dopamine.

because you're basically, you're jacking it up, and you're going to get a deficit the next day. And so he could have gotten four. Imagine we would have gotten twice as many having. Yeah, so it's as many books. You've said that strivers get less happy with age. Strivers get less happy with age if they're actually trying to do what made them good originally. Should we define a striver? You listen to the Woot Podcast.

Shout out to our listeners. There are people that are hitting it hard, that they're dedicated to progress. they want to be excellent in what they do, that ordinary is simply not good enough and they're willing to do the work. That's what strivers have in common, and not everybody is a striver. Most people aren't, as a matter of life.

But what strivers have in common is that they're really successful and they stand out from an early age, largely because of working memory, indefatigable focus, a willingness to work really hard and innovation. And what they find is that those qualities, which are called fluid intelligence,

by the psychologist Raymond Cadell, those increased through your 20s and 30s. And so you're the star litigator, you're the best surgeon in your class. You're somebody who's going to invent something on your own. You come up with these mumbling, really brilliant ideas. If you're a songwriter, you're the Rolling Stones writing, I can't get no satisfaction, which means you're in your 20. And this is the fluid intelligence that, for whatever reason, seems to peak at age 39. 39 is weird modal age.

So, you know, we have data on Nobel Prize winners in physiology, chemistry, and physics. You know, the sciences in the Nobel's, and they tend to, on average, do their Nobel Prize winning work at 39. And they win it much later, obviously, for the body of work. But they're really inflecting work that they do. And, you know, then going through it, you find that science inventors is the same thing. You have to know a lot, but you still have to be at the height of your innovative powers. And 39 is kind of this magic age. I mean, look, your results may differ, but probably they won't very much.

And you find that almost every industry where you have to use your brain and creativity, that's kind of when it's going to happen. And then it goes to decline, which really sucks for a lot of people. So that's the problem, but that's actually the opportunity. What happens is that the food intelligence declines, but the crystallized intelligence, which is a better kind of intelligence comes in behind it. And the big mistake the strivers make is trying to stay on their first curve. but they don't know they've got one behind it.

And that's a different curve with different skills and different discipline. And you have to know it's common and step onto the new curve. And crystallized intelligence is our ability to make sense of, you know, disparate knowledge. It's wisdom, essentially. It's the ability to teach things we've learned. Yeah. It's basically having a huge library in your head and knowing how to use it. That's the reason that people in business who are over 50 and especially over 60,

they tend to make fewer errors, fewer judgment errors. It's not because they're smarter, it's just going to have unbelievable pattern recognition. Something new comes at them, something new comes out of the business, and they're like, I've never seen it before, but I've seen it. Like, how do you know? I don't know. That's because you have so much data at that point

that you're actually able to triangulate across unknown circumstances. That's the reason that the smartest people in the world under 30 often make what looks like boneheaded judgment errors because their library is like one book. and they didn't find what they're looking for in that book, that's what it comes down to. So do you think great intuition and say like a business context comes from pattern recognition? I do believe it comes from pattern recognition. And that's what really all the best known of science data suggests, that you have a whole lot of episodic memory that you're not completely conscious of.

Your hippocampus is full. It's like widen your library at Harvard. Right. And you're able to access it not entirely consciously, but that's when we talk about gut, intuition or gut. That's just data. You've got tons and tons and tons and tons of data. You know, that's why grandma had such a good judgment. You know, you go to grandma with some newfangled problems, you're like, yeah, don't do that. Or let me tell you something because grandma had an unbelievable database in her head. It's also, by the way, really important for us to keep in mind that what

you put in your library matters. And so everything that you're doing in your 20s and 30s and 40s is stalking your library with books. If you're wasting it on stupid nonsense, like binging Netflix, you're stocking your library of something you're not going to need. And then, you know, you're going to be looking at, you know, better call Saul, instead of something you can actually use in your business and your life and your family and your community. So if intuition is based on pattern recognition and, you know, sort of this notion of being able to tap into a library, is it possible for a younger person to ever have better intuition than someone who's much older with much more pattern recognition? The more you learn, the better you are.

is what it comes down to, learn, learn, learn, learn all the time. That's really important. So don't waste your time consuming what the YouTube algorithm feeds you. Make sure that you have an agenda for your own learning. And in certain points of the day that you're dedicating yourself to actually learning new things, reading. And by the way, watching and listening is really, really good too. But make sure that it's incredibly nutritious all the things that you do. And you'll be supercharging your library.

You'll be stalking your library. You'll be ahead of your time and your intuition. by the way, I wish I'd known this. Yeah, it's interesting, I'm thinking back on starting whoop and, like, why I felt such strong conviction to do it. And I don't think I had the library that would have justified doing it. You'd done some other things, is my guess. You'd cross-trained over to it, right?

Well, I had over-trained as an athlete. And, you know, I sort of had this feeling like there should be a better way to measure the body. But, like, when I talked to people who had much more experience than me, so to speak, their pattern recognition was, this is a bad idea. You shouldn't do this. Yeah. And, you know, by the way, you might be incredibly gifted. Some people just have a lot more of it than other people. And what that means is that when you're my age, when you're 60, you're going to be unbelievable. You're going to be unbelievably potent. If you can do what you did in, what, 2012, how old were you? When you're 60, you're going to be a force. That's what it comes down to. We're going to have that much more. If you were that good at 22 to see around the corner like this. Now, a lot of that is fluid intelligence. So it's not just picking the right thing. It might have been that there could have been five or six things that you could have picked,

and you had the focus, the energy, the innovation, the creativity, which is pure fluid intelligence, and you hit it. You hit the right thing? Great. Terrific. It doesn't necessarily mean that you picked the right one, but that you, you know, you threw the thing unbelievably fast and hard and well at a target and actually hit the bullseye the first time. Most innovators in their 20s, they have on average, 3.8 failures before they have their first success. 8. Yeah, well, I mean, it's like, I don't know what the point eight is, but the point is that the data say there's lots of failure on the basis of that. So that's the case. My guess is that you had unusual crystallized intelligence for a young guy, super high fluid intelligence, and

some good luck. And you put all those things together. You get some luck. You got whoop. Yeah, there you go. Let's say you get a woo. Let's transition for a second. What is happiness? Happiness is, well, what is it not? It's not a feeling. Most of the people listening to us are like, God, I want to feel happier. And most people think it's a feeling, and that's one of the biggest reasons that people don't get happier is because they're chasing a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness, like we just finished Thanksgiving, that the smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Everybody listening to the Wu podcast knows that those are the macronutrients that lie behind all consumable calories, is protein carbohydrates, in fact, aka food. happiness has three macronutrients as well, has feelings that are associated with it, that are evidence of happiness, but the three parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need. And those are the three three things to get better at. You want to be a happier person, become much more skilled at enjoying your life, getting satisfaction in your accomplishments, and understanding the meaning of your

existence. And those are three big philosophical and neuroscientific and behavioral skills. enjoyment, satisfaction, purpose. Meaning. No, no. Purpose is part of meaning, and they're not the same thing. Oh, interesting. Yeah, purpose is goals and direction. And that's one element of meaning. The other parts of meaning are coherence and significance. Coherence, meaning, why things happen the way they do and significance, why your life matters. So those are the three macronutrients of meaning. So purpose and meaning are not synonymous. Purpose is a subpart of meaning.

Okay, got it. Yeah, I'm splitting hairs here, but, you know, it's... Well, the definition matters, because one of the things I felt in reading your book about happiness was the sense that if someone has a different definition of happiness, everything that follows from how they think about the pursuit of it changes. I mean, that's true for anything in life, right? You know, it's like, what does it mean to have a healthy body? Being 400 pounds and sitting on the couch a lot, what comes after that is going to be a problem. Yeah, right. Do you think most people's definition of happiness is different from your own?

Most people's definition of happiness is based on intuition and feelings, and that's a problem, is my view. The reason I got into this as a scientist, well, frankly, it's because I wanted to be happier. And I was administering what I knew as a scientist to my own life. But I also recognized that when I did that and my life improved dramatically, that it was a shareable and it was a universalizable phenomenon. And so that's the way that I actually did that. I think there's a huge amount of misunderstanding. And when I talk about this with audiences, which I do all day, all year long, I'm doing this constantly. There's a lot of epiphanies and a lot of people and tons and tons of feedback about people who are actually becoming happier as a result.

I feel like a common thing you hear from people is I want to be happy, but, or I can be happy, but, or I'll be happy when. Yeah, yeah. What do you say to these people? I say that's one of the other big mistakes is looking for the outside world to change such that you can be happy. This is very natural, by the way. And this is the main reason that marriages break down. They say, my marriage will be happy when she stops haranguing me, when she stops being mad at me

for working all the time or, you know, whatever it is that you have to do. And that's not the way to repair your marriage or anything having to do with your well-being. It doesn't make sense to try to change the entire outside role to conform to your idea of what the best life is. You should look inwardly. Plus, it tends to lead you to a grievance or a victim-based mentality, which is the almost surefire guaranteed way to become a miserable person. So that's a problem. I will be happy when money is better. I will be happy when the job market improves. I will be happier when this health problem resolves itself. When I get this solved, that's not the right way to look at it. It's like, I'm going to start being happy now with all

the things I can actually change. I have power over me because I am. I'm the founder of me, Inc. I'm the startup entrepreneur of the enterprise that is my life. So I got to get after it. It's the bottom line. And everybody can do a ton. That's why I write. That's why I teach. I mean, it's an empowering message when you frame it that way. Now, one of the thing that comes through is that being happy also requires an embrace of unhappiness. Talk about that. Unhappiness is funny because, of course, we don't want it. There are a lot of people act like they want to be unhappy because they're walking around a grieved all the time and offended and etc and what people are doing today but but nobody actually wants to

be unhappy there are negative emotions and negative experiences that are part of any life in negative emotions are nothing more than data to alert you to threats emotions exist as part of the limbic system of the brain they were evolved between two and 40 million years ago there's literally only four negative emotions fear anger disgust and sadness they're universal the universal language that says there's a threat avoid it is how it comes about, you're going to get it because there's threats on the horizon. The fact that you have those emotions is evolved from, you know, your ancestors in the place to scene who passed on their genes because they had negative emotions. Negative emotions keep you alive and keep your genes alive

as the bottom line. We should be very grateful for them. And we're not going to escape from them. Negative experiences come because we don't like all the things that happen in our life. And this is completely normal and natural as well. This is not just inevitable. It's also how we learn and grow. The biggest mistake to people make today, particularly young adults make today, is thinking that unhappiness is something to be eliminated or avoided and they waste their time and energy trying to eliminate and avoid unhappiness. That's the wrong approach. I know you don't want to be unhappy, but you're going to learn and grow from it and you're

going to stay alive and survive because of it. So suck it up, Buttercup. This is actually the road to happiness lies on a road that goes through the neighborhood called unhappiness. That's just the way it works. So the master stroke is basically this. If you can get to the point where you're so master of yourself and your emotions, and this is what I teach to my MBA students at the Harvard Business School,

is how to manage yourself because you're your most important employee. And self-management comes from emotional self-management. As we can get to the end of the day and say, I am truly grateful for all the wonderful things that happened to me today, and I'm truly grateful for all this stuff I hated. You know why? Because I'm alive, and I'm going to be alive tomorrow. Bring it on.

That's the way it's supposed to work. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member.

And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. Yeah, the life of an entrepreneur is certainly running at problems. And like, you know, any success that I've had in building this company has come through some notion of putting myself in very uncomfortable situations. And just this feeling of like you're in the eye of the storm, but that's where you belong to be. Yeah. I mean, I talk to CEOs all the time. And I'll say, so what's going on?

They'll tell me about some crummy thing that's going. It's like, ah, the general counsel called. and the regulator and, you know, whatever, stock price, you know, whatever it happens to be. And I say, look, if there were no bad times, your dog could ruin your company. I mean, the whole point is that that's why you're employed is for the bad days, not for the good days. Nobody needs you on the good days. You know, when you're basically jumping out of a cake in an all-staff meeting saying, you know, hooray, everybody, it's a bonus. You're not necessary. You're completely superfluous on those days. That's just dessert. You know, the days when you're needed as any kind of

competent founder, entrepreneur, CEO, chief executive is the worst day. That's the day that you earn your salary. And the interesting thing is it's also what you remember years later. You know, like when I think about the journey of building this company, a lot of my fondest memories were those sort of moments of being in excruciating pain and then coming out the other side. Whereas like the sort of local highs of you raised this much money at this kind of evaluation or you almost don't even really remember them. Of course not. And, you know, the same thing is true in your personal life for sure.

I mean, what made you understand your resilience? Yeah. You'd tell me about times when you were afraid or you got sick or somebody who loved died or somebody you were in love with broke up with you and you didn't die. You were resilient because you are your enterprise. Whoop is an extension of the enterprise of your life is what it comes down to. all these things are expressions of it and the bad things that actually happen are evidence to you that you are the person that you're trying to be. The fact that you are able to be resilient

and strong in the face of tremendous hardship is evidence that you're a good life entrepreneur. Well, the other thing about this remarkable sort of relationship between happiness and unhappiness is like the profound contrast and the importance of the contrast that comes from enormous pain. When I was reading your book, I was, I was thinking about a friend of mine. I lost this year to suicide. It was my best friend. I'm so sorry. Yeah. And it happened in January. And I actually, I hadn't really, I hadn't really experienced loss like that before. And I went through this period of being like, you know, really in a lot of pain physically and emotionally. And And the powerful thing that I felt during it was just how wide my emotional range was.

You know, I didn't realize that, you know, I kind of thought the whole scale was just between six and eight, so to speak. You know, I didn't realize it had a one, you know? And then when you come back up to six, you're like, wow, I feel great. You know what I mean? So it's the craziest thing to say, but in a weird way, it made me happier on the other side of it. Yeah. No, those strong experiences are evidence that.

you're walking the face of the earth. Yeah. Sadness is a really funny one because sadness is an evolved trait. People say they want to live without sadness, but of course that's completely wrong. Sadness is your natural reaction against the idea of being separated from somebody or something that you love. And you're supposed to feel the grief is unmitigated sadness. It comes from a part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is designed to make you feel mental pain. That, I mean, the thing just like, well, just lights up like a Christmas tree and you lose somebody when somebody breaks up with you and somebody dies that you love like your friend who died. I mean, it's just, it's truly terrible is the whole point. And we evolved this because

we didn't, you know, during the place the scene or whenever, we, we, if you didn't feel sadness, you would do something stupid and be thrown out of your tribe, walk the frozen tundra and die alone. Devoured by a wild beast. You have to not want to be thrown out of your tribe, not want to be separated from your kin and your loved ones is the whole point. And this is your incentive is to avoid activity in the dorsal anterior, singular cortex of your brain is what it comes down to. I mean, the point that I'm making, of course, is psychology is. Yeah. The more that you understand the biology, the more that you understand what a miracle it is that you actually feel this. Grief is not unremitting, however. And when you actually feel that grief and you feel

it lessen and you're stronger as a result of it, you have a post-traumatic growth, which almost everybody gets when they have this kind of velocirous stronger person is the bottom line and that's that's a wonderful aspect to the human species as well yeah is that if you didn't have this experience you wouldn't be you'd be weaker than you're today you're a stronger person as a result of that you wanted it you didn't yeah i feel that there's it's it's sort of an unbelievable fascinating life experience that everyone goes through at some point yeah no it really are your parents alive yeah and so you haven't actually had the experience of losing parents and And ultimately, you will be the last generation in your family.

That's weird. That's a real weird one. Because I remember, you know, 10 minutes ago, I was a little kid with parents and grandparents. And now I'm the grandfather. Yeah. I'm grandchildren. You know, my parents are long dead, you know, decades. And it's a funny thing how you actually proceed through that.

And there's a natural sadness that comes with it. But there's a naturalness as well that you come to understand that you only get by going through the dark night of the soul that comes from loss. How does happiness evolve with age? Happiness is funny with age because this is where we actually have some variants. So the pattern that doesn't very much is that happiness tends to slightly decline from early 20s until early 50s. Not a lot, not catastrophic. On a 1 to 10 scale of self-evaluated life satisfaction, people usually go from about a 9 to about a 7.

And, I mean, your results may differ too because I was always way below that because I'm not a naturally or a happy person. But still, I recognize that. Most people also think they're going to get happier through the 20s and 30s and 40s and then don't. And that's hard. That's tough. Well, because, you know, all your dreams are coming true. I mean, everybody listening to us, you're making the money. You have the jobs.

If you want the family, you're starting the family. And all those things are great. But the truth is there's a lot of difficulty during these periods when you're growing up and you're in your 30s and 40s. Life is complicated, right? How many kids do you have? None yet. Not yet. One in February.

Oh, congratulations. That's wonderful. Fantastic. Yeah. It's the best. But here's the problem. Remember that happiness is satisfaction and enjoyment and meaning. Your enjoyment's going to go down, but your meaning is going to go up.

Enjoyment is a short-term happiness play and meaning is a long-term happiness play. And it's totally worth it. But people fall prey to this idea. It's like, I had kids and I thought I was going to be so much happier. I'm not. I'm not getting asleep. And they're exhausted. I'm having conflict with.

my spouse i mean it's just but it's you know it's going to be okay it's going to be more than okay is the whole thing but so knowledge is really power on on you know what happens with this but that's one of the reasons that people tend to decline a little bit in your early 50s your happiness turns around and almost everybody sees an increase in happiness through their 50s and 60s all the way to about 70 and it's because the kids move out and then it break you break up into two groups so the population is basically 50-50 between those who keep getting are almost all the way to the end and those who start back down again. Now this is the important thing for the whoop audience, fellow strivers, take heed.

We all think that if you're really successful in life and work really hard and reap the rewards that you'll be on the upper branch, because that's what the world tells you. Work for success, money, power, pleasure, fame, and happiness comes for free. That's wrong. I don't want it to be wrong. I'm striver par excellence, man. I mean, I'm just like a grinder. the truth of the matter is that when people, when strivers get older, they're on the wrong side

of a bunch of curves. And the result is that strivers tend to be on the lower branch of the happiness curve. Strivers tend to get unhappy after 70. I do a lot of my work on how to not be on the lower branch. And I know how to do it, but you have to go against your instincts. Is some of that tied to retiring? A lot of it's tied to retiring. I have to imagine a striver retiring loses sort of a bit of identity and well yeah i mean i mean if you if you never do anything with your life you don't know when it's over right you have a big party and somebody takes the punch bowl away it's going to suck and sooner later you have to step back you have to step back is what it comes down to so the people who retire and are happier are people who are not retiring away from something but to something

you have to be a huge strategic plan so you can't afford to keep working you're missing too many things that you want to do and need to do with your family your community And so I help people retire. I guide people. I have people I work with that are the strivers of the universe that I guide them into retirement by setting up a strategic plan for what to go to as opposed to what they're leaving. If you're running a great big publicly traded company and you're getting retired by your board at 65 and you're like, awesome, love golf. It's going to suck.

It's going to suck. Guaranteed, 100% is not going to be nice. You're going to get a deep tan and you're going to feel really depressed. and your wife's going to be like, I married you for better, for worse, but not for lunch. And it's going to be a problem. So I walk them through that. But the bottom line is you have to know that strivers suffer when the party is over. And so you have to take steps in advance.

And that's a lot of what I talk about. That's a lot of my writing and it's a lot of my coaching. What do we have to do to deal with this sort of depression epidemic? It seems to be happening also at a younger age for people. Yeah. No, the depression epidemic is largely for people in their 20s. For adolescents and young adults is where we see the major explosion, like the 4X clinical depression and generalized anxiety that we see.

And it was really starting going back to about 2010, 2012. And so it's been correctly observed that this is how technology started to interact with experience of young adults at that time. You know, friendship and relationships were becoming to be mediated by screens. and that's terrible. And I can tell you the neuroscience behind it, you know, the whole idea of the, you know, eye contact and touch elicits oxytocin, which is the neuropeptide in the brain of human bonding. It's intensely pleasurable.

When you don't have it, you'll become depressed, anxious, you'll become an insomniac, it'll mess up your eating. It has huge physiological implications. The bottom line is you'll be miserable and you don't have those things. So if you're only dating online and you're only seeing your friends on social media and you're only going to work through Zoom, we'll be on to your brain. And that's going to be a big problem. And that really started in 2012, et cetera, et cetera.

The problem actually is a little bit deeper than that. What we find is that if you go back even until about 2008, you find that that's the point in which young people started to say, I can't find the meaning of my life. And they weren't even looking anymore. And so that's what I'm writing about right now. I'm writing a book right now called The Meaning of Your Life and how to find it before it's too late because that's what we really have for the explosion. of depression and anxiety. It's not that it's screens fault. It's that screens are what we do

when we don't have meaning when we're frittering away our time, hoping for the best, waiting for something to happen, and they make it worse. And there's a lot of really interesting neuroscience and what we need to do to find more meaning in our lives. And there's some very specific prescriptions that we can actually take that can set people back on the right course and that could even potentially create a cultural revolution that would make us all a lot better off. It's fascinating. I mean, one thing I am amazed by is just the power of gratitude when it comes to happiness. I mean, if there's anything I've found that's like actually like a happiness hack, it's this idea of being grateful about things.

Yeah. You know, every morning, it's part of when I meditate, I think about a few things that I'm grateful. I've gone through periods of time where I'll write them down. But you, you know, you're literally just happier when you do it. Yeah, and there's a reason for that. The, we're evolved. We literally have more brain tissue for, you know, negative emotions rather than positive emotions. And it makes perfect sense. You will stay alive

because of negative emotions. Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions will literally, will literally save your life. They certainly would in more dangerous times, but even still today. Negative emotions occupy such a big part of your brain that you can jump out of the way when a car is barreling toward you in a crosswalk. In 74 milliseconds, it'll transmit through the occipital lobe of your brain where you process visual imagery to your amygdala, which will light up through your hypothalamus, to your pituitary glands, your adrenal glands, and that will spit out adrenaline. Seventy-four milliseconds, you'll jump out of the way. Thank God for negative emotions, right? And that's why they occupy such a large part of your limbic system of your brain

compared to your positive emotions. But today, that gives you what we call a negativity bias, meaning that resentment is a lot more frequent visitor to your psyche than gratitude. You know, and every time you're thinking of yourself, like, man, you know, first class in United Airlines has really gone downhill. You're missing the obvious, which is that you're sitting in first class in United Airlines. Sure. You're getting to your destination safe and something like on time. And you're 30,000 feet in the air. And you're sitting in a pretty comfortable seat and the phone isn't ringing and you're able to do your work.

But you're like, yeah, man, I don't know. It's like they're not doing a good job here because resentment presides because of your negativity bias because of your evolution. So the way that you can override that is not by being a polyana. It's not like, everything's great. No, not everything's great, but paying attention to what's more realistic. Reality leads to gratitude. Every single person listening to us should be more grateful than resentful and should be more grateful than they are. So if you're basically, if you're a reality-based person, which if you're a striver, you better be a reality-based person.

If you're an entrepreneur, it's like, I want the truth. I don't care. If it's hard, I don't care if it's hard. I don't care if it's ugly. I don't care if it's going to bum me out, man, baby. I want the truth. I demand the truth. Okay, demand the truth of your brain.

And the way that you do that is actually by paying more attention to the things for which you're grateful, as opposed to letting your brain slide into resentment. And that's the way that works. And there's all kinds of techniques for doing it. You can be in a gratitude circle with your friends. You can have gratitude lists. You can do loving kindness meditation or gratitude meditation. In vipasana, if that's what you're practicing.

There's lots of ways to do it, but all you're doing is like, yeah, I'm going to stay in the, you know, the 20% gratitude as opposed to 80% resentment because I'm dedicated to reality. What are other methods for people listening to this to be happier? The habits of the happiest people are actually not that complicated. And so a lot of what I talk about, you know, I talk about the, you know, how do you get more enjoyment? How do you get more satisfaction? What are the things that the mistakes that you make like, you know, thinking that if I get that, if I get to IPO, if I, you know, right then i'm going to love it forever if i get that house that car that marriage that kid i'm going to love it forever not making those mistakes by understanding how you know how homeostasis

works in the brain etc i do a lot of that stuff but the habits of the happiest people are actually kind of simple the happiest people pay attention to four things every day and there are lots and there are lots of ways to do this the way to do it is is not the important thing doing it is the important thing they pay attention to their faith or life philosophy in other words things transcendent to them where the universe is large and they're little. That's what it comes down to. You're getting that through your meditation. I'm getting that through my religion. Some people get that by studying the fugues of Johan Sebastian Bach or, you know, walking in nature without devices in the Brahmaum Querta, the creator's time, an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.

There you go. Yeah, with 248 sessions. Exactly, right. You're good, you have a good memory. But you got to do it. You got to do something where you're little in the universe is large, because that gives you peace and perspective. That's what all happy people do. And skip, it is done at its peril. Second is family. Family is a mystical bond. Maybe not mystical. I told you about oxytocin the neuropeptide of family ties and kin-based ties. And if you don't have that, you're going to be in trouble. The best way to get that is through your family. The only reason of schism with your family's abuse and, you know, newsflash differences of political opinion are not abuse. It's good advice. Don't screw that up. You know, one in six Americans are not talking to a family

me over today because of politics that's crazy craziness and the third is friendship and and strivers struggle with this one strivers really struggle with friendship not because they don't know a lot of people but because they have a lot of deal friends and not very many real friends and when you're super hard worker i'm a 14 hour a day guy so are you so are most of the people listening to us all right they're on the treadmill you know multitasking right now you know listening to us no judgment it's although don't waste the hour you need to get into your default mode network in your workhead as well but don't turn off the wood podcast it's it's really really important that you're you're not utilitarian about your friendships you know you need to spend the time and do the work to have people

who just love you who are useless to you and you're useless to them you simply can't get the happiness that comes from true intimate love-based friendships if everybody's useful. Aristotle talked about this 2,500 years ago. Wow. It talks about friendship of transaction. Useful friends. They had a telos, you know, to them. And then the atelic friendships, the friendships of virtue. We just love each other. Usually you have a shared love for a third thing, you know, and that's why the goal of marriage by the fifth year. It's going to be really successful. It's called a companionate love, which sounds not hot. But what it is his best friendship. Also has a lot of passion in it, but you have shared love for the

relationship, for the cosmic entity that is your love for the children that you're bringing into the world, for the faith that you share. I mean, it's just, that's when marriage is the best, man, because that's what you really need. That's the apex of both family and friendship is, is, is marriage, is your romantic partnership. Lifelong, pair bond, man, like wood storks. You're in it together forever. And if you can, not everybody can. But that's the goal at least. And last but not least is work. And all that matters with work is earning your success.

That's why merit-based systems, the only systems that matter. You know, tenure-based systems, loyalty-based systems suck. They demoralize people. They drive out the best people because merit is everything, earning your success, creating value with your life, and being fairly evaluated on the basis of the value that you're creating is life-affirming and then serving others. Where people need you.

And it's great as a CEO of the, this company because you hear you get all these strokes all day long people like I lost all this weight yeah I got healthy no and testimonials are great totally but everybody in the company everybody everybody everybody needs to actually hear the testimonials bring in clients whose lives have been changed to thank the people who are not on the front lines totally that's the key thing so service to others and earning your success that's what matters with work but the bottom line to remember is faith family friends and work I love that what's one thing that you do every morning that kind of sets the tone for your day.

Yeah. So we talked about this a little bit, but number one is I conquer myself by getting up before dawn. I win. It's my first win. I experienced a lot of jet lag in my life. After we leave, I'm going to go to speech. And after that, I'm going to the airport.

I'm going to Dubai. I'm going to be nine hours off. I'm pretty familiar with that flow. Yeah, yeah. And last week I was in Spain. And so there's a lot of that. But the bottom line is I'm going to conquer my will to sit under the covers. Marcus Aurelius, you know, the Roman emperor.

He wrote the meditation. He was a, he thought of himself as an emperor. He's remembered as a philosopher because the diary he wrote to himself is now read his literature. Everybody who listened to the Woot Podcast has or should read the meditations of Marcus Outreelis. Read it.

Get it today. It's free. You know, let's go get put it on your device and start reading it today. Better yet in paper. And he talked about, were you made to stand to the covers because they're warm? Literally, what he wrote to himself. And this is, this isn't, you know, 1800 years ago. I mean, this is, there's nothing new under the sun. And that first victory really

matters. And then what do you do after that first victory? You start to act like the victor because your life is your enterprise. That's why I'm getting after it. That's why I'm doing 60 minutes a day, seven days a week of exercise. And then I'm getting after my soul. That's when I worship. You know, I get cleaned up. My wife and I, my partner, my fellow wood stork, my pair bond, the love of my life. Then we worship together. the first thing that we do together every day is we worship this would go somewhere for it we go to we go to that fit the schedule in the right way that's six 30 to seven and then then i get to work and i have i have one already my day is like it's on the charts already every single day and that's really really critical and and who knows how long we've been able to keep this up i i was going to say

i wish i were 40 but i you know i wouldn't have been able to have the wherewithal or the perspective to do that. I'm 60 and I feel physically better than when I was 25 years old. I've got way more energy. I have way more vigor. I have way more optimism. I have way more hope for the future of all the things we'll be able to do. And I don't know how long I'll be able to do it. But it's okay. It's okay. There's a plan. It feels like you'll be able to do it for a while. That's my read. Well, congrats on everything. It's been really fun getting to sit with you, Arthur. And if people want to learn more about you or your work or your books, where to? One Stop Shopping is Arthur Brooks.com. And that links to my colony at Atlantic, how to build a life that comes out

every Thursday morning for 1,400 words a week on the science of happiness. You know, based on the biology and the behavioral science of happiness, it'll also link to books and talks and videos and social media and that's where to go, Arthur Brooks.com. All right. Well, we'll leave it in the show notes. Thanks, Arthur. Thank you. Thank you. Big thank you to Arthur Brooks for coming on the show. Again, happy new year, 2025. It's going to be a great year for everyone. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question, what's the answered on the podcast? Email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952.

You can literally sign up for free for Woop. That's right. Free 30-day trial. That's at Woop.com. you get the full whoop experience, you get the best wearable in the world, strain, recovery, sleep, do it all. New members can use the code will, WIL, to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. And that's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening.

We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.